Sunday, October 02, 2011

Amazon's Silk...The First Cloud Computing Browser And A Big Threat To Google?

When Amazon announced the launch of the Kindle Fire, probably the biggest story was the introduction of Silk, the browser on it.

In addition to being a much faster way to surf, the Silk browser and Amazon will be creating a huge database of surf habits/history. A threat to Google's advertising business?

A typical web page requires 80 files served from 13 different domains. This takes a regular browser hundreds of round trips, and adds seconds to page load times.

When you use Silk, without thinking about it or doing anything explicit, you’re calling on the computing speed and power of the Amazon Web Services cloud (AWS).

A typical web request begins with resolving the domain names associated with the server and establishing a TCP connection to issue the http request. Establishing TCP connections for each request consumes time and resources that slow down traditional browsers. Silk keeps a persistent connection open to the backend server on the AWS cloud so that there is always a connection at the ready to start loading the next page.

In addition, the Silk backend server keeps persistent connections open to the top sites on the web. This approach further reduces latency that would otherwise result from constantly establishing connections. Further, the connection between Silk and the backend infrastructure uses a pipelined, multiplexing protocol that can send all the content over a single connection.